


Mistakes

by MistyBeethoven



Series: "Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You With a Story" [22]
Category: Life Under Water (1989)
Genre: BBW, Beaches, F/M, Falling In Love, Human, Kissing, Lies, Memorial Day, Mistakes, Mother-Son Relationship, Overweight, Romantic Friendship, Self-Harm, Self-Indulgent, Self-Insert, Shyness, Slice of Life, Truth, Vacation, Weight Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:14:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22533823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistyBeethoven/pseuds/MistyBeethoven
Summary: Kip is a liar with a mistake that still haunts him. For a girl who thinks everybody lies or wounds in one way or another, I'm not surprised and find myself still liking him anyway. When he takes me to the Hamptons for Memorial Day weekend, we find ourselves discussing the necessity of mistakes and the fact that they make us human.
Relationships: Jinx (Life Under Water) & Me, Kip (Life Under Water) & Jinx, Kip (Life Under Water)/Me
Series: "Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You With a Story" [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1589944
Comments: 4
Kudos: 2





	Mistakes

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably an odd next entry for this series. But when I watched this short recently the end made me want to cry and the fact that people are so foolish often and make such painful mistakes. Then I realized that that is part of what makes us humans in the first place and the lesson we must learn.

We will make mistakes.

That is a definite. God only ever made one person that didn't so it's best if we just try to accept that. Still most of us spend our lives trying to make excuses about how we were blameless and never made a mistake in the first place. It's a common trait and maybe that's another way for God to tell the saints apart from the rest of us.

Kip was always kind of torn between the two. I met him first when he came into the donut shop where I worked during a break in his courses over at Columbia. He was friendly and handsome and liked to talk despite my obvious shyness. I could tell that he was full of bull instinctively but then I was used to distrusting people from a childhood marked by a father whom wasn't the greatest and a grandmother whom had helped make him that way. The world often seemed built of lies and human beings merely born to help in their creation, survival and spreading.

I liked Kip though. He was kind even past his deceit.

I would be deceiving myself, as well, if I made the mistake of lying to myself that I was completely truthful. For instance, when he asked me what the red mark on my arm was I told him it was the scar from a bad burn I had received when cooking.

I could tell Kip, with his intelligent yet innocent face and brown eyes, knew that I had not given him the truth but let it go without comment. I was a poor liar and my quiet nature had not given me practice to be otherwise.

The young man could lie with the best of them but you could catch them in it if you paid close enough attention. I don't think he could keep his fiction straight so he'd contradict himself sometimes. Stuff about what line of work his dad was into or where he had grown up. If just kind of happened and only if you were paying close enough attention or cared for him enough could you catch him in one. I often let them slip by but I found myself laughing one day as I lowered my head and he caught it.

"What's so funny?" he asked slightly affronted.

He had come in for his usual coffee and donut, which I was preparing to hand to him before he headed to his classes at Columbia. He was telling me about how he was heading home to the Hamptons for Easter and how he dreaded it because his mother's Persian hated him and routinely scratched his arms. That was when I smiled and inadvertently laughed.

Staring into Kip's brown eyes, I really wished that I hadn't. I liked this handsome and easy to talk to boy even if what he talked to me about was mostly bullshit. I hated to think I had offended him and that he'd find some other donut shop and waitress to serve him.

"Ummm," I faltered. "It's just you told me you weren't allowed to have pets when you were young because your mother was allergic to fur."

I saw his quick mind trying to find the next lie to feed me just like I was about to hand him the apple fritter he had ordered to feed on himself. "Well, she takes shots now," he stated with a look of sincerity.

I acted as if I believed him.

Getting caught now in a casual deception, I never found Kip telling another one and he seemed to come in more often. Unfortunately, along with him, he brought a girl named Angela, a classmate whom was obviously interested in Kip. The relationship between them was not clear to me immediately but I slowly discerned that they were friends but not lovers.

At least not _yet_.

I was glad about that. My feelings for Kip had grown over the months of knowing him. It was unfortunate for me, though. While Angela was a gorgeous, thin and confident woman, I was a merely pretty, very overweight and insecure creature. Seeing that Kip was fond of me in his good natured way, the competitive college girl had started to try to antagonize me. In her mind we were in some competition for her friend's affections even though she was the one blessed enough to spend more time around the man since they attended the same college. 

I tried to turn the other cheek even though I wanted to slug Angela on her over rouged one.

Kip seemed oblivious to the whole affair except for the time Angela crossed the line of his apparent blindness for him to finally notice. 

"She sure takes up a lot of space back there," the blonde had whispered. "If I was her boss, I'd fire her to make extra room."

She giggled after saying it and I almost dropped the coffee pot I was holding. I felt Kip's eyes on me and my shaking hand as I poured the coffee. When I handed him the change, he took my hand in his and I looked into his eyes, sadly. What I couldn't outright say was probably easily revealed in my eyes: the anger, sorrow, pain and humiliation.

He never brought Angela back to the donut store again.

* * *

"So you have plans for the long weekend?" Kip asked me, handing me a ten dollar bill for two honey dips and a large black coffee with sugar.

"No. I'm from Ontario, Canada," I stated. "There's no way for me to go and get back in time for work on Tuesday."

The dark-haired boy nodded. "How about you come out to the Hamptons with me to see my mother?"

Seeing the flash of worry in my eyes, he held up his hands. "I promise I won't try anything."

I looked at him shyly but with a glimmer of mischief. "Will I meet your mother's Persian?"

"Her _what_?" Kip asked, genuinely confused.

"The Persian that doesn't like you. The one that attacks you whenever you get near it," I reminded him with a naughty glint in my eyes, I was sure.

"Oh that one!" Kip feigned remembrance. "It died. Ran into the water and drowned. Just like Ophelia."

"And here I thought cats hated water," I said in fake amazement right before I agreed to accompany him over the Memorial Day weekend to the Hamptons.

* * *

The drive to the Hamptons was suprisingly comfortable. Maybe after seeing one another for months we were used to each other's company. In any case, I rested against the back of the convertible's passenger seat and we talked. At one point, I looked up at the sky to see clouds like fluffy white ships sailing in what looked like another sea above us.

"Are you adhering to the speed limit?" I inquired.

"Of course," came the reply; another lie. The ships of clouds were zooming too quickly by for it to be the truth.

I looked down suddenly to make sure that my seatbelt was fastened incase a cop stopped us. It would be interesting to hear what excuses Kip would give: sick aunt...that I was pregnant and he was rushing me to the hospital because I was in labor. That one hurt so I quickly forgot it. Except it wouldn't go away. 

"I'm glad Angela didn't want to come," I commented, thinking about how she would have made a joke about being surprised that my seatbelt fit.

"Oh she did," Kip corrected my erroneous assumption. "I just wouldn't let her."

I thought maybe he was joking until I turned to look at my companion and saw dead earnestness written across his handsome features for what may have been the first time since I had met him.

* * *

Kip's mother met us at the door and right away I could tell that she had a rather unique relationship with her son. Their banter was like something out of a play and I tried to suppress a giggle because it was so amusing. She had an intelligent and interesting face and was very attractive in a warm way. She looked me up and down and I could tell she wasn't expecting me to be the type of girl Kip brought home with him.

"Separate rooms or one?" she turned to ask Kip.

He looked at me and I couldn't decide if he was trying to persuade me to say the latter.

"Separate," I replied, feeling my cheeks burning.

"Good," she stated. "You don't have any sexual diseases do you Erin? Kip tends to like girls with syphilis or gonorrhoea..."

"Mom," Kip warned, his cheeks turning redder, I think.

"You don't like folk music either do you?" she added, ignoring her son. "There may be a comorbidity between the two. The hippie influence and all that free love stuff."

"No," I answered. "I'm a virgin, who needs her bra and will never burn it. I'm into a lot of music, Sam Cooke, Boney M, the Ramones but not a lot of it is folk."

I didn't think they heard my musical preferences because they were still stuck on the first confession. I probably shouldn't have even said it but the air of unabashed honesty between the two kind of helped to promote it and I found myself regretting it, especially with the strange way Kip was looking at me suddenly.

"Well if you choose to lose it," his mother remarked, "I suggest you don't choose Kip. He's a lovely boy but not very responsible and if he takes after his father he'll be selfish in bed."

Kip then looked about ready to punch her. He bit his lip but I looked at him sympathetically and he seemed to be appeased somewhat, that same blush returning to his cheeks.

* * *

Jinx, Kip's mom, was often in and out of the beautiful house that they shared. It was apparent that she wasn't going to serve us large meals but expected us to get our own. She was like the flu: sometimes you caught her and sometimes you didn't. She was more pleasant than sneezes or coughing fits, however, and listening to her witty verbal repartee with her only offspring was hilarious.

Kip seemed to be more honest around her because she was the type of mother he needed to mother in return if that made any sense. They had formed a slightly skewed but affectionate relationship in Kip's father's absence.

I received the opportunity to learn more about the young man I fancied during our stay at the house. He was always in my company usually and it was nice.

The night following our arrival, when his mother went out to have supper with a beau, I fixed him a meal and we sat and ate it at the dining room table.

"So how come you don't go to a college, Erin?" he asked looking at his pastrami sandwich. "You seem pretty smart."

"Well, when I was younger I wanted to be a high school dropout that was successful when I grew up. Those were always my heroes."

He laughed and took a bite from the sandwich.

"No," I commented. "I'm serious. When I went to high school and it was Hell, everyday somebody insulting me for my weight, I wanted to drop out. I thought it was a bunch of crap anyway. Then I got home schooled due to my kidneys and they made me take an extra year because I was smart enough for it. I was upset about that."

Kip asked me with concern about the current state of my health and I replied that it was okay. Staring at the red scar on my wrist, I guessed, I wasn't lying. He had only meant my physical health after all.

Thinking about the past, though, and how everything leads to the person you are in the present, all those little mistakes all your own and of others, I decided to add something.

"When I was really young though, my mom wanted my sister, Tara, and I to go to college. She had this really, really large owl bank in Tara's room and any chance she got she'd put change in it. Our grandpa, would too. Well one day we went out. When we came back that evening,and Tara and my mom went to her room, the owl was lying on the floor, smashed to pieces everywhere. It turned out my dad needed money so he'd taken a baseball bat to it and broken it. He was always owing this person or that. I remember how he wasn't sorry at all; he just looked kind of smug...like he was proud about doing it.

"But that was about the end of our college dreams in a way: nothing more than a whole bunch of dangerous shards that we had to be careful of until they were picked up. Funny though, what really bothered me was the owl being destroyed like that...it had been in her room and our lives for so long...to see it like that was like seeing a friend dead."

I was staring into the space ahead of me, reliving the past and seeing those bits of fragmented owl. From out of the corner of my eyes I could see Kip not sure how to behave. I think he was about to kiss me for a second and then something stopped him. Eventually he just reached across the table and took my hand where I had bitten myself once. Knowing that he had been afraid to cross the distance, I leaned over and kissed his smooth cheek, not brave enough to touch his full lips with my small ones. For one moment it looked like Kip might have been about to retaliate by doing what I had been too shy to but then Jinx had come back and we'd both backed away, not looking for an audience.

* * *

"Erin," I heard Kip stating in the dead of night and I woke up to a dark bedroom with a young man sitting at the edge of my bed. "Want to go for a walk on the beach?"

Part of me wished that there had been a third option wedged in there but I decided on the walk. 

I was about to get dressed when he laughed. "Go in your nightie. Nobody will see. And if they do they won't care."

I looked at him, dressed in a t-shirt and a pair of orange shorts. "This isn't a hazing of some sort? Trying to get me since I boldly escaped?"

"No," he said and stood. "Now come on. I want to see you in the moonlight."

With such a romantic sentiment, I was finding it hard to refuse but difficult to accept. At some point he'd realize I wasn't as pretty as Angela. I rose from the bed, though, my feet unsure. I tripped on a pair of slippers by the bed and fell in to him. He lost his breath for a moment but caught me. Then we looked into each other's eyes and started to laugh again, only to have to try to quieten the sound in fear that his mother would interrupt us again.

It was a distance to the beach but Kip drove us there. I guessed, he had a destination in mind. The streets were silent, except for a cat or two. They weren't Persians.

"Maybe that's your mother's cat," I stated. "Maybe it went to get a haircut and didn't drown at all."

"There never was a cat Erin," he returned.

"There wasn't?" I asked oblivious. 

When he looked at me it was with that same seriousness and I gently touched his shoulder, feeling somehow that he was on the verge of being just Kip, honest with all deception pushed aside. We arrived where he had planned to take me shortly afterwards.

On the beach, the sand was nice between my toes and I laughed, looking up at a starry sky. He took my hand and led me to a house.

"Two years ago," he started, "I spent some time with two girls at this house."

"Is this a true story or a porn movie?" I asked trying to raise an eyebrow, an act I had never been particularly successful with.

"True story," he said sadly. "There was Amy-Joy and Amy-Beth. The first was beautiful and confident while the second wasn't as beautiful but was different and wounded. She once hurt herself quite badly. She told me that and I kissed her and loved her even more. I loved and wooed Amy-Beth but I fucked Amy-Joy and I spoiled it all. Amy-Beth saw me naked after I'd been with her friend. The look on her face...the way it made me feel. I think I saw myself, who I really was through her eyes in that moment. I was exposed in two ways."

Kip looked so fragile then I felt more sympathy then I ever had expected I would for him. "Life would be easier if cocks only ever became erect when a man was in love and a woman's legs ever spread when she felt the same."

I said it and it was crude and poorly worded, partly to make him laugh, but most of all I wished it was true; I wished that people could only ever make love when they were actually in _love_. 

The boy keeping me from being alone on the beach only looked at me with even more pain and I knew that this is the pain and regret that he would carry with him for the rest of his life. This is the mistake that he will forever wish he had not made: that he had made love to the woman he had been in love with.

Standing under the light of the moon with a man revisiting his sorrow, I suddenly saw very clearly the truth about mistakes.

"But then I think maybe God is smarter than that," I add philosophically. "Half of the most beautiful people the world has ever seen were probably considered mistakes. If people that loved each other could only ever have sex the world would be pretty empty."

"And that's a bad thing?" Kip asked flatly.

Knowing he was joking, I playfully pushed his strong shoulder, liking the feel of it from even that brief touch. I folded my arms so I wouldn't regret not being able to touch him for longer and see the initial act as a mistake, as well, for making me long for that which I probably couldn't have.

"I do believe that mistakes are necessary," I continued. "Nothing in this world means anything without the chance of goofing up...that's how God tests us and how much He loves us: He lets us be ourselves. And being human we will always make mistakes. We just have to learn to live with them without letting them devour us."

Kip grabbed my hand in the moonlight. "How'd you really get that scar?"

I breathed in deeply. He obviously knew the truth already.

"When I am really upset I hurt myself," I confessed. "It makes me feel better but when it leaves a scar I start feeling bad for my skin...for my body. I see it as something else apart from me and then I feel that I've hurt something innocent. I keep trying to stop and I do for a while but it's so easy to fall back to it. It's a mistake I always end up making. And maybe that's the important thing about mistakes and what God wants us to do with them: learn and then try to never make them again."

"Then there's some hope for me," Kip said.

"Why?" I asked as the man suddenly stepped in front of me as I looked down at my hand and the scar I would wear for the rest of my life as a reminder of my mistake.

Just as Kip wore his own one on his heart.

I felt his hand on my chin, raising my head to meet his eyes.

"Because you're standing here with me and nobody else," Kip said.

"I'm not Amy-Beth," I reminded him afraid now that his attraction isn't really for me but for the girl he hurt.

"No, I know that," he says, holding my gaze. "I love you for being you, Erin."

Maybe if I hadn't been used to knowing when Kip was lying and telling the truth by then I would have doubted him. But I didn't.

"I love you too," I nodded and he leaned in to kiss me under a moon that made no mistakes but was worth little more than the light it gave to those whom did.


End file.
